Like any robust civic institution in a democracy, the university can’t merely tolerate differences. As even mainstream liberal theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls have acknowledged, the university community needs to draw upon the same motivational resources provided by plural religions, traditions, and cultures that enable the members of the greater society not only to survive but to flourish. Our differences may well keep us from embracing a common, singular vision of the good, but they motivate us to commit to common projects, common purposes, and shared goods. We are, as the legal theorist John Inazu writes, “unlikely to agree upon the meaning of abstract notions” such as justice, truth, dignity, or the fundamental purposes of our lives and communities. But at least most of us in the university accept that these are fundamental concepts calling for passionate yet generous debate. Given its history and the continued strength of its ideals, the university may be the institution best equipped to sustain such an experiment in pluralism and democratic discourse.
Chad Wellmon at The Hedgehog Review
I’ve been thinking about this essay by Chad Wellmon for the past couple weeks—I would recommend it to everyone teaching general education in a college or university, and I would certainly recommend it to my former students and colleagues from Columbia’s Core Curriculum. It offers more of a history of general education than a direct argument about the value of specific requirements, but this chronicle of core curricula nevertheless reinforces that the “university should be an institution in which these discussions of competing visions of knowledge and of the good are encouraged and sustained, where the practices and virtues that enable them are cultivated in young people and in ourselves.”